“Australian company Metamako’s network switch is able to route incoming information through to trading servers in just four nanoseconds, and can lower the time it takes to execute a full trade—from the time it receives market information from a stock exchange to the time it sends out a “buy” or “sell” order—to just 85 nanoseconds, nearly three times faster than Cisco’s general-purpose networking switch.

The lightning-fast gear is just one link in the high-speed trading chain, of course. Servers have to parse incoming information, make a decision, and send the order back to the switch, before it heads along super-fast cables to an exchange. But Metamako’s hardware highlights the lengths that traders are willing to go to lower the “latency” of every component in their setup. The company figures it sells about 100 units a month at around $20,000 a pop—according to the Wall Street Journal’s piece on the company, that’s pretty affordable compared to many of the components in a high-speed trading rig.”

“U.S. multinational corporations’ offshore cash holdings nearly doubled between 2008 and 2013 to more than $2.1 trillion.[1] Why is such a huge sum held abroad and designated as “permanently reinvested”? The answer has to do with the way the U.S. corporate income tax system treats the earnings of foreign subsidiaries of U.S. multinational corporations.”

“If you’ve noticed that colossal lottery winnings are becoming almost common this year, it’s no accident. Four of the 10 biggest jackpots in United States history have already occurred in 2016, an engineered outcome intended to generate mind-bogglingly big winners.”

“The share of Hispanic and black employees in the company’s U.S. workforce didn’t budge from a year ago, remaining at 4% and 2%, respectively. The percentage of women at Facebook inched up 1 percentage point to 33%.

Facebook blamed its problem on the “pipeline,” meaning the number of women and minorities entering the tech industry.”

“Humans can speak 150 words per minute, for instance, but can type only 40 words per minute. The conversational aspect of the medium lends itself to personalized experiences with computers understanding context from previous questions the user has asked and the user’s location. While many voice recognition tools can be frustrating to use now, Meeker said when speech recognition reaches 99% accuracy, people will go from barely using the tool to using it all the time. Speech recognition accuracy rose from about 90% in 2016 from about 70% in 2010. And the use of voice has been risen noticeably. Google GOOGL -1.13% voice search queries, for example, are up 35 times since 2008. Sales of voice-based devices such as Amazon Echo could be just about to take off, compared to more text-dominated devices such as the iPhone, whose sales peaked in 2015.”

“Blockchain is the technology created to support bitcoin, but it may soon surpass the crypto-currency in importance. In the first quarter of 2016, venture capital investment in startups commercializing blockchain eclipsed that in pure-play bitcoin companies for the first time, according to industry researcher CoinDesk, which has tallied $1.1 billion in deals to date.”

“Google’s ads have driven over two billion total app downloads, the company said. And it got there thanks to the universal app campaigns ad tool, which lets developers promote their app across search, YouTube and Google’s mobile ad channels. The tool doubled the app installs volume over the past year.

At its developer conference last month, Facebook said its app promotion products have driven two billion plus downloads, too. Facebook is often considered the go-to place to drive app downloads, but Google is now talking more openly about its performance.”

“Here’s a terrifying nugget of data to wrap your hands around: based on IRI data, just 55% of respondents in its study had retirement savings in 2016, meaning 45% of baby boomers surveyed had absolutely nothing saved for retirement. ”

“At CMU, enrollment in the graduate course “Introduction to Machine Learning” has soared nearly 600 percent in the past five years. Applicants to its machine learning Ph.D. program have doubled in six years. Last spring, the university added its first undergraduate course on the topic.

Other universities are seeing a similar spike in demand. At the University of California, Berkeley, enrollment in “Introduction to Machine Learning,” an undergraduate course, nearly tripled in less than two years.

The number of applicants to the university’s artificial intelligence degree programs (which include machine learning) is climbing, too. It nearly doubled in the past five years, according to figures supplied by Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.”